Yet another sumptuous offering from the Mainstone Press, the small Norwich outfit doing sterling work in preserving and representing unfamiliar gems of 20th-century British art.
Eric Ravilious was one of the great craftsmen of the inter-war art scene, an illustrator, engraver and painter whose life was cut tragically short by the Second World War. As well as setting the aesthetic tone for the stripped back, pastel-coloured 50s, Ravilious's imagery accompanied the cutting edge graphics of the day, including posters for London Transport and designs for Wedgwood.
Sussex and the Downs contains reproductions of 24 of the artist's landscape watercolours, abstracted to a point of matchless simplicity and rendered in deeply sympathetic tones.